Hourglass
by streco
Summary: He placed it gently on a table and overturned it, not pausing a moment to watch the life trickle out of the top before pivoting and exiting the room the same way he'd come in.


_Hourglass_

* * *

The whitecoat's face was forgotten the moment he walked in the room (though Fang wasn't sure if it had even been remembered in the first place), for all eyes were on the object in his hand: a single medium-sized hourglass, about size of a brick. He placed it gently on a table and overturned it, not pausing a moment to watch the life trickle out of the top before pivoting and exiting the room the same way he'd come in.

Fang's eyes met Max's—_what the hell?—_and he saw the panic behind her eyes and in her shrug before she could even register it in her head, he was sure. In this place, confusion never came first; it was always terror. If something was unfamiliar enough to raise question, you'd better be scared.

The two of them quickly did the math in their heads and held up three fingers simultaneously—three minutes. That was how long they had, judging by the volume of sand and the distance from wood support to wood support and the size of the triangular-prism-shaped cutouts from the original cube. Fang's head snapped to the left and he peered through the bars of his dog crate at the clock, his heart beating harder with every curiously anxious _tick _it emitted.

His eyes strayed over to Max as hers trailed away from the hourglass. They both nodded shortly in understanding—_keep an eye on it_.

He returned to the clock.

No words were exchanged. He was sure Iggy could hear each individual grain of sand smashing and grinding against the others, loud enough to be audible but quiet enough to drive him insane, like the faint buzz of a mosquito around your head. Angel was not too naïve, Gazzy wasn't too lighthearted, and Nudge was not optimistic enough. They all knew, and at the same time, they didn't.

Sixteen years, Fang thought, as their first minute came to a close. Sixteen. Half of it spent in hell, the other half spent everywhere in between. He couldn't say he was free—what was free? Absence of fear? Safety? He had never had any of that. Sixteen years of trying to be a teenager, sixteen years of trying to be a father, sixteen years of trying to sleep with both eyes closed, sixteen years of surviving. It wasn't life if you had to work for it. So what had he lived? He hadn't, had he? Sixteen years of unanswered questions and now his life was focused on the three minutes displayed in front of him, slipping between glass and piling up as if it were useless.

Sweat was beading on his forehead now, but not a normal sweat. A flulike sweat; a cold sweat, though his skin was itching and burning and trying to escape him.

He had always found comfort in Max's eyes, but he was afraid to even seek them. If her life was flashing before them as his was now, he did not want to see it. Not only would it be watching the same thing twice, but it hurt him to see her suffer through the twisted nostalgia they both were having.

_Stop it_, he thought to the clock, bragging of time wasting away. The secondhand snapped past the twelve and now they were on the last minute, and Fang's mind hit overdrive trying to calculate what was happening. What did this hourglass count down, and why had it been placed in front of them?

He looked at Max for a moment, and her eyes were cast down, studying her hands. Through the heavy feeling on his body, he felt a healthy kind of confusion—a wonder in the back of his mind. She made brief eye contact with him but then stared at the hourglass again with a new expression. She tried to mask it but failed to from Fang. She was no longer curious. No, now she was waiting. She knew what the sand in the glass was running toward, was anticipating. She dreaded it. The blank look on her face screamed at him, screamed _to _him, but she refused to fess up to anything.

Now he was genuinely frightened, more so than he had ever been in his entire life—again those sixteen years flew past him and, no, he had never felt this way.

He searched for words but couldn't find them, and the minute was almost over, and his heart was trying to escape his chest and crawl into his sleeve, and Max was still there, still not looking at him, watching the hourglasses' final beads of life disappear into a useless pile of sand.

As the three minutes came to a halt, Max's eyes jumped from the device to his face, and she searched it for help, for meaning, for comfort. She gave him a pointed look and mouthed three words, and then held up her right wrist.

Today's date.

There was no sound—he saw a split second of agony rip across her features and then nothing.

Then, there was a blur. He was hitting the floor and adrenaline was singing an aria through his blood, the crate was exploding in a flurry of iron and the hourglass; the simple toy that had sucked the breath out of his best friend, the girl he loved, the leader of his family, the only person who'd always been beside him, was in pieces in his hand, the shards of crystal cutting open his tender skin and emptying his own life on the too-clean floor of the room.

And in his own frenzy of absolute abandon and devastation, he didn't notice when the same forgettable whitecoat entered the room once more, holding a second hourglass.

* * *

_idea that hit me at random  
__miss you all on ff net  
__been really busy  
__love, steph_


End file.
